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<h3>Features</h3>
<p>A <b>feature</b> is a way of grouping and describing different functionality
that makes up a product. Grouping plug-ins into features allows the product to be
installed and updated using the Eclipse update server and related support.</p>  
<p>Features do not contain any code.&nbsp; They merely describe a set of
plug-ins that provide the functionality for the feature and information about how to
update it. Features are packaged in a <a href="../reference/misc/feature_archive.html">feature
archive</a> file and described using a <a href="../reference/misc/feature_manifest.html">feature
manifest file</a>, feature.xml. The following is the first part of the manifest for
the platform feature:</p>
<pre>
&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
&lt;feature
      id="org.eclipse.platform"
      label="%featureName"
      version="3.3.0"
      provider-name="%providerName"&gt;

   &lt;description&gt;
      %description
   &lt;/description&gt;

   &lt;license url="%licenseURL"&gt;
      %license
   &lt;/license&gt;

   &lt;url&gt;
      &lt;update label="%updateSiteName" url="http://update.eclipse.org/updates/3.3"/&gt;
      &lt;discovery label="%updateSiteName" url="http://update.eclipse.org/updates/3.3/"&gt;
   &lt;/url&gt;

   &lt;plugin
         id="org.apache.ant"
         download-size="0"
         install-size="0"
         version="1.6.1"/&gt;

   &lt;plugin
         id="com.jcraft.jsch"
         download-size="0"
         install-size="0"
         version="0.1.31"
         unpack="false"/&gt;
	...
&lt;/feature&gt;
</pre>

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